Tonehammer Samples

A colleague of mine, Troels Folmann, is a very well-respected composer in the game industry, having scored such award-winning titles as Tomb Raider Legend and Tomb Raider Underworld. Many of us first met Troels through his fantastic annual lectures at the Game Developers Conference, in which he teaches us his tricks on how to improve the quality of our sampled orchestral mockups. It's always one of the highlights of the week for me.

He's a big proponent of custom recorded samples. In fact for years, he simply brought a Zoom field recorder around with him everywhere he went and just created his own sample library, recording off-beat objects like handrails and furniture, salvaged junk, etc. Now he's making that custom library available for purchase, and it's definitely worth checking out if you're a media composer.

Tonehammer is the company he founded with sound designer Mike Peaslee. Their catalog is rich in offbeat, unusual instruments: examples include a hangdrum, whale drum, cylindrum (essentially a PVC pipe instrument), marching band, detuned piano, etc. And if that's not enough, he has a couple sample sets called 'Anti-Drum Vol. 1 and 2', in which you can find samples of water coolers, stopwatches, Converse sneaker squeaks, soda can tabs, and a leather couch (which is actually quite an impressive, usable sound!).

I bought seven of his sample libraries, and was immediately able to use them in a project I'm working on. They're definitely worth a listen.